Best of the West

Bronc riding in rodeo these days can be summed up in one word: conservative. Whether saddle bronc or bareback, judges reward control. The more a man rides like a machine, the more restraint and discipline he demonstrates, the more likely he is to win trophy buckles and paychecks.

It wasn’t always so. Time was, bareback riders tended to spur high, wide, and handsome, hang and rattle, flop and pop, spend every fraction of every eight seconds with the constant threat of eating dirt—yet somehow staying aboard in a dangerous dance accompanied by singing spur rowels. Saddle bronc riders exposed themselves to danger with every jump, raking spurs from maneline to cantleboard, balancing on buck rein and blue sky, throwing caution to the wind and putting a little wild in the Wild West sport’s classic event. Such a bronc rider was Larry Mahan. Every trip out of the gate, he rode with flash and flair. No cautious, controlled rides for him—he accepted the challenge of the roughest horses and threw his best challenge right back at them. It wasn’t always pretty—but it was always exciting, always fun to watch, and, with Mahan, always more likely to win money than not.

And that’s not to mention his superior abilities as a bull rider. Bull riding is not an event that lends itself to the conservative, controlled approach currently the preferred style among bronc riders. It will always be a wild and wooly contest for cowboys willing to let it all hang out for the eight seconds between the rattle of the gate latch and the call of the claxon. And nobody knows that better than Larry Mahan.

All-Around Champion Larry Mahan aboard a saddle bronc at Phoenix, Arizona, in 1967.

Courtesy of Hall of Fame rodeo photographer James Fain.

Twice (1965 and 1967) he was world champion bull rider. Six times he was named world champion All-Around Cowboy, using his talents in riding bulls and broncs to rack up the most annual winnings in all of professional rodeo. Five of those All-Around championships (1966-1970) were consecutive—a record that stood for many years until broken by another rough stock champion, Ty Murray, and again by timed-event master Trevor Brazille.

Larry Mahan was the first cowboy to compete in three events at the National Finals Rodeo, and is still the all-time leader in qualifying in rough stock events. With ten successive days of competition, the NFR is a grueling event for any cowboy. More than a few top hands over the years have been unable to withstand the grueling pace, forced to miss go-rounds or drop out altogether owing to injuries. Ten of the world’s toughest bulls in ten days takes a toll. Ten rank bareback broncs in ten days can rattle your teeth loose. As many saddle broncs as often will test the toughest cowboy.

Larry Mahan gaps a bareback bronc at Salt Lake City in 1971. Mahan was rodeo’s All-Around Champion Cowboy six times.

Courtesy of Hall of Fame rodeo photographer James Fain.

For years, Larry Mahan tripled the threat faced by most cowboys qualifying for rodeo’s biggest event, climbing aboard three lunging, ducking, diving, twisting, bone-jarring animals every day at the NFR. And it took an entire year of much of the same just to qualify to absorb that punishment at the Finals. It is impossible for anyone who has not ridden rough stock to realize just how painful and exhausting it can be. And, for those who have, it is difficult to understand how Mahan survived so much abuse for so long.

Born in Oregon in 1943, Mahan started riding calves at age 11 and earned his first championship buckle and $6 prize money for winning the calf riding at a 1957 Redmond, Oregon, junior rodeo. By sixteen, he was competing against the pros. At his first professional rodeo at Klamath Falls, Oregon, he won the bull riding.

It would be difficult, probably impossible, to count the miles Mahan traveled over his rodeo career. To get to more rodeos and to win more money, he learned to fly and piloted his own plane, competing in multiple rodeos most weeks during the season—a season with few breaks. Like all rodeo cowboys, he paid his own entry fees, travel expenses, and medical bills, as there are no guarantees in rodeo—you live on what you win, or you roll up your chaps, hang up your spurs, stay home and get a job.

Larry Mahan has accomplished much, much more in his life. But when I was of a tender age, strapping my rigging on bareback broncs and dreaming of gold buckles, he was my inspiration and my hero.

And for all that, Larry Mahan ranks as the Best of the West when it comes to rodeo cowboys.

—Four-time Spur Award-winning author Rod Miller writes fiction, poetry, and history of the American West and sometimes watches a movie.